Parking tickets are a major problem and expense for private and commercial vehicle operators worldwide. Parking rules are unclear, opaque, ambiguous, inconsistent and confusing, leaving operators in the dark as to their compliance with applicable parking rules. As a result, more than $5 billion is spent on parking violations in the top 50 urban areas. Vehicles get an average of four tickets per year. Significant time and money is lost driving around trying to find the best parking option. Significant fuel is consumed in merely trying to locate a parking spot. This excess traffic attributable to locating a parking spot translates into excess fuel consumption, wasted time, traffic congestion, and emissions pollution.
Circling streets around a destination in search of nearby parking wastes precious time and creates frustration. The frustration is even greater when returning to a parking space to discover that a car has been towed because of a violation such as the street cleaning schedule. Finally, ambiguous or missing signage leads many drivers to simply pay parking tickets even when they were, in fact, legally parked. Parking complaints are commonplace among people living in or visiting cities.
Commercial drivers also experience difficulties with parking. Delivery services, cleaning companies, contractors and other local businesses often view parking tickets as just a cost of business. In the US alone, over six million mobile resource management (MRM) systems have been deployed, with the number expected to double in the next five years.
There are a number of local providers in certain markets that provide information regarding street parking and public garages. There are several providers that provide auctions for parking spots (which is difficult due to the short time constraints of finding parking). A few providers use outdoor sensors to determine whether a parking spot is vacant.
Existing efforts at addressing the problem of parking spot information fall short in several aspects. Collecting and maintaining current parking sign data on a global scale has not successfully been accomplished. The only way to collect the parking sign data is to travel down every street of every city to capture the parking sign data. This is because cities do not actually possess the parking sign data in enough detail regarding location of parking meters, valet parking signs, loading zones, etc.; however, knowing exactly where these parking zones exist is critical information to the end-user.
What is needed is a system for capturing the parking sign data directly at the point of application—the street level. This is because there exists no accurate, central repository of parking rule information for each street and city. For the most part, cities do not possess or maintain this information in any reliable way, and assembling such a database based on an intentional planned methodology—in other words, keeping track of each sign placed and where and when it was emplaced—is simply impractical, especially in an enormous municipality where construction, vandalism, weather storms, accidents, etc., make any such effort a rapidly moving target.
Indeed, parking enforcement is performed according to what the posted parking rules are for a given alleged violation—no database can be checked; rather, the test is what was posted at the time and place of the alleged violation. Therefore, directly capturing the rules and tagging their locations is the only way to address this problem.
Additionally, there simply exists no central database of available parking spots. The only way to create such a database is to manually assemble it through actual data collection, and then continuously maintain it. This is because vehicles are continuously occupying and vacating spots all over with no central repository of tracking this data. Some smartphone parking applications exist, but nearly all of them focus on either garage parking locations or parking meter timers. None provide comprehensive information and advice about street parking in combination with recommendations on the optimal parking options.
Some companies provide parking information online, ranging from simple attempted directories of parking garages to attempted databases of on-street and off-street parking in a handful of cities. Existing online parking information systems fall short because their data is limited, stale, and does not account for dynamic changes in available parking spots, nor catalog the parking rules, nor provide location based parking rule information in real time, among other shortcomings.
Some companies attempt to deliver parking information to GPS units. Generally, these vendors focus on commercial parking garages rather than on-street parking.
Some companies provide parking applications for handheld mobile devices. These generally attempt to address only one part of the parking problem, such as meter timers, commercial parking garages, etc.
Further, all existing parking information technologies provide data that is stale, old, and frequently out-of-date. Such solutions do not provide a means for continuously updating and refreshing parking data according to a useful and effective frequency, i.e., continuously. Existing parking spot information solutions are limited geographically due to collection methodology. Further, there is no commercial user solution. There is no product or service that provides a comprehensive parking spot solution. Therefore, there is a need for a distributed, continuous parking data collection solution that can rapidly and efficiently collect and aggregate parking data. There is also a need for a convenient, timely, and accurate parking information distribution solution across multiple access points and mobile and integrated delivery means. Therefore, a system is needed that provides this data and also over various channels: online, through GPS systems, and via smartphones. There is also a further need for a contemporary, dynamically adaptive database of parking rule information for urban, suburban, and rural areas worldwide. There is also a need for parking solutions for the unique needs of commercial users.
It is against this background that various embodiments of the present invention were developed.